Afghan Election Rests on the Backs of Donkeys

Monday

Oct 26, 2009 at 4:09 AM

Local officials must get 15 million ballots to thousands of remote Afghan villages — many unreachable by car — in time for the Nov. 7 runoff.

SABRINA TAVERNISE

FAIZABAD, Afghanistan — In this remote corner of northern Afghanistan, distances are measured in days. The only paved road lasts for less than a mile, and travel often takes place on the back of a donkey.

Apply those qualities to an area the size of South Carolina, add in the topography of Colorado, and you get an election official’s nightmare, which is about how Sayed Masood saw it on Sunday, as he frantically prepared for the presidential election runoff on Nov. 7.

“There is very little time,” said Mr. Masood, the top election official in Badakhshan Province. “I have to hire 130 district coordinators by tomorrow.”

Now that Afghanistan’s runoff vote seems imminent, local election officials across the country are scrambling to get 15 million ballots to thousands of villages in Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Nowhere will that be more difficult than in Badakhshan, a mitten-shaped province here in northeastern Afghanistan that is nearly entirely covered by mountains.

Aside from one short paved strip in the center of Faizabad, the provincial capital, the roads are dirt, with ruts and slants that make any car ride feel like a voyage at sea during a storm. Six districts have no roads that connect to the rest of the province, and ballots for those areas will be taken by helicopter, Mr. Masood said.

But even in areas with roads, many villages can be reached only by footpaths. Those ballots will be delivered by brigades of donkeys, which election officials rent from local farmers. At the price of $60 per donkey — the monthly salary for a night watchman at a public school — there are many willing participants.

Local election officials are embracing their responsibilities with vigor. A young official named Ezatullah spent seven hours in a minibus traveling 50 miles to pick up election materials. Like many Afghans, Ezatullah uses only one name. When asked why the drive to Faizabad took so long, he replied blandly: “It’s not a road.”

Then there is the weather. Some of the highest passes in the district of Nusai now have as much as six feet of snow, said Taj Wali, a 22-year-old election official from there. The district, which borders Tajikistan, is one of the province’s most remote.

To pick up his district’s election materials, Mr. Wali and a colleague walked four days to the nearest road. The distance is routine for people in the province, but not for other Afghans. A friend who came to visit took five hours to walk a distance that Mr. Wali said he could walk in an hour.

The four-day walk to get election materials was a chance for Mr. Wali and his colleague to tell stories. They talked of their school days as they made their way along a narrow mountain path high above a river. They spent most nights with villagers, who fed them. Other nights they slept in mosques.

Once they reached the road, they spent two more days jouncing in a packed minivan to Faizabad.

“It would have been better to keep walking,” Mr. Wali said, grimacing.

The donkeys may present the biggest challenge in what lies ahead. Some of the mountain trails are so narrow that the slightest step can become treacherous, particularly with giant loads on a donkey’s backs. In the previous round of voting in August, several empty ballot boxes were lost over the side of a cliff.

Mr. Wali was worried about the snow. Some voters walked six hours to reach polling centers in August, he said, and slushy trails on Nov. 7 could be the last straw. He expected to make some polling centers mobile, to move them closer to more remote villages.

“If you saw the area from the air, you would panic,” Mr. Wali said. “You wouldn’t even believe how difficult it is.”

The first round of voting was riddled with fraud, with one of every three votes cast for the incumbent, President Hamid Karzai, rejected as fake. As a result, Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission announced that it would dismiss hundreds of workers. Even so, no one seemed in danger of being fired in Faizabad, where throngs of smiling election workers piled into rooms full of computers to fill out paperwork.

Fraud came in many guises. In the Jurm District in the center of the province, mullahs were the main instruments for pressing people to vote for Mr. Karzai, local residents said. In the village of Ali Mughla, a mullah received $4,000 to take villagers to election centers, said Ezatullah, a night watchman in a school.

It was something that Ezatullah, who is 58 and illiterate, insisted that he would never engage in. He was going to vote for Mr. Karzai’s opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, mostly because that is what his daughter did.

“I don’t care if I’m hungry,” he said. “I would never take money for that.”

But mullahs do not call all the shots anymore. More than 40 percent of Badakhshan’s voters in August were women, which reflects the fact that increasing numbers of girls are getting educations, something mullahs here have traditionally opposed.

That seemed to thrill Ezatullah, the watchman. He gestured toward a tiny girl in a white scarf and shiny black shoes. “How can they tell her not to go to school?” he said.

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